


One Foot on Sea, One on Shore, OR; Where the Bachelors Sit

by Cottia



Category: Much Ado About Nothing (2011), Much Ado About Nothing - Shakespeare
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Play, Bad Sex, Bisexual Character, Blank Verse, Come Shot, Come Swallowing, Comeplay, Cousin Incest, Cunnilingus, Dick Jokes, F/M, Femdom, Genderfuck, Oxfordians don't interact, Queer Themes, Run-On Sentences, Shakespeare-concordant wilful ignorance of Italian geography, as in Shakespeare-style kissing cousins but tagging just in case, greco-roman mythology in lieu of using one's words because you're a dramatic gay bitch, heteronormativity is a prison, if you're wondering if something's a dirty pun the answer is yes, what is gender??? we just don't know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-04
Updated: 2019-08-14
Packaged: 2020-07-31 07:53:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20111704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cottia/pseuds/Cottia
Summary: Shakespeare is readGender's performativeRomantic Comedy'sHeteronormative"Beatrice and Benedict are same-sex leaning disaster bisexuals who are both extremely surprised when they end up falling for someone of another gender." - zforzelma.tumblr.com[chapters 1-2 are PG-13, chapter 3 is filth. Choose your own adventure.]





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This will end happily; I'm a sap. Comments and validation make me squee and write more and I appreciate every single one of y'all, but that doesn't mean I'm good at replying to them, I'm sorry if I forget. Finding references and easter eggs makes my heart sing. 
> 
> I regret to say that sexual positions and behaviors are still wrongly correlated with gender today. That said, in this fic all interpretations of gender, sexuality and kinks are valid; the ambiguity is a feature not a bug. 
> 
> Much Ado is unusually accessible in that Shakespeare wrote it mostly in prose; blank verse can be used for royalty, soliloquys and expressions of emotion. Catch me writing Richard II fic.

They are gone from Messina that night, then on to Cremona, then Mantua, then Padua, and finally to Firenze, wed in the little hours in the littlest church, witnesses a tolerant barkeep and their virtuous landlady (who would not have rented them a room without). The first flashes of morning pass over the Duomo before they crawl into bed, too exhausted to do more than curl up in each other’s arms after sending word that the thing is done. No-one at home could have doubted Benedick’s intentions, nor fear Beatrice a fool; yet the trials of Hero had shaken Leonato greatly, and to flee a wedding with such pomp as would befit them would be a low prank if it taxed this new and fragile familial peace, harder-won as it was than the wars which still stooped Don Pedro.

The sun is well past its zenith when they wake again, stiff from the carriage and saddle, heat-drunkards sobered by their knowing; they are husband and wife, in the eyes of god and man, until death. The game won, they reach for each other, seeing their prize, and find themselves afraid. Making war had been a merry play, safely knowing their object would never be reached, and so it is again on that first day — until their object climbs the horizon, and things go to pot.

Don Pedro’s first serious thought of their matching, was that neither would endure silence if a joke could be made. Such humors must be matched, he said; else jokes feel like blows, and liver met with spleen. 

Thus Benedick finds his beard regrown, and with his head in her lap Beatrice calls out to the saints, curses, rends her sheets, tears her hair, tightens on Benedick like a vice, and yet for all his steady labor the lady does not fade at last. Benedick is as good a soldier to a lady as he has ever been to his lords, but Beatrice, who in daylight would fire at any target, in secret will not let the notched arrow fly. She who has no mother must speak herself into existence, and while her tongue works as hard as Benedick’s, she will not lose her self.

Frustrated, she drags him north anon, pulls him into kisses until his mouth stops her thoughts, thundering with thick blood and shining with the sweat of the journey. The mood lifts, she feels Benedick heavy against her, and thinks now, yes, I do, yes, I will, yes.

Now it is Benedick’s turn to falter. Welcomed, longing, longed for, he now finds no force to his thrust, waves crashing unmoved on Hymen’s rock. Desire finds no purchase, and is lost. He crumples. A broken sword turns, and smites its owner.

Benedick is shaking. Beatrice looks away; she has not seen him afraid before. Reluctant, troubled, worried, frustrated, yes, but not afraid. He looks at her, and is frightened, and she begins to fear herself.

He reaches out. "Sweet, sweet Beatrice, I--"

"Sweet as a shaved lemon," she says, the words bitter shards on her tongue. 

The drapes hang limp in the humid air, and it's too hot to touch, naked above the sheets. Still not looking, Beatrice reaches her hand behind her on the bed, twines her smallest finger into Benedick’s. He squeezes tight, once, twice, and loosens, lapsing into quiet.

It takes a long time to fall asleep, trying to match each other's breathing. The next day they both try to cook, separately, and fail separately, and pretend to read, separately, and if both find the charred remains of what was once their favourite foods in the trash, they do so separately.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I count at least five sex puns in this chapter (although if you find more I'll claim they were deliberate), and one word not invented until the twenty-first century. Have at it.

Brilliant Florentine daylight dies, and still they have not spoken, beyond the offer of coffee, and the decision to take a brief, stilted passeggiata. Benedick brings two cups of wine to the terrace, but Beatrice shakes her head; she is both surgeon and patient to her pain, and cannot cut while numb.

She draws breath. 'Silence does not become us.'

'And yet we become silent.'

A brief honeymoon. Not even a day. Benedick sits, looks out onto the piazza below them, drains his wine, lifts her cup to his mouth as if by habit, offers it, is again rebuffed. His hand tightens on the arm of his chair until voice rises in him like a gorge. 'Will you not speak? I did not marry for peace - if I did, I would have chosen another. Better a skirmish than this cold war.'

‘There is no war between us.’ A war she could handle. 

‘Then speak, I pray thee. I would have your mind.’

‘Aye,’ Beatrice mutters, ‘and naught withal.’ Benedick hears it.

‘Come, I did not resign my singledom for naught. Yet I, having met my match, burn now to be o’ermatched. The intent was on me to do all that does befit a husband.’

‘Not me, then,’ says Beatrice. ‘For I am not a wife. Not in my eyes, my hands, my thoughts - my wits, which were by Hero's deep calamity so affrighted, that all sense did fail me. Designs deceive as masks, we played our parts: to you the mastering soldier, I the swoon. Now, costumes off, revealed all this remains. I have heard men say, no man can bear me, yet barely more can I be made to bear. You have got yourself a mule to wife.’

‘There is no mule here.’ Benedick reaches for her shoulder, her hand, and Beatrice lets herself lean into the touch. ‘Though’ — he laughs coldly at himself — ‘there may be an ass. I did not think myself such a bachelor.’

Beatrice thinks of Claudio, Graziano, Livio. Of lost Ferdinand, remembered when Benedick hears of storms at sea. Of Margaret, left behind in Messina with tears and promises. The pricking of Leonato’s too-sharp joy in seeing she had got herself a husband. She curls her hand around Benedick’s. ‘I had thought myself a bachelor entirely. If bachelors marry, are they bachelors still? But who else could we marry but other bachelors?’

‘I thought I was not made to marry,’ he replies, wondering. ‘I never dreamed of marrying a maid.’

‘Better I marry her — though we lose our bearings, and remain maids.’ She sighs. ‘If I were a true bachelor, we would be merry.’

‘If I were a maid, nothing would come between us. Sweet lady —’ Beatrice scoffs.

‘Sweet lord, sweet lady, then, sweet devil, sweet seraph - I have abused your sex as freely as you did mine own, you cannot doubt this truth. I did not want a wife. Yet I did see thy face before we wed; no Leah veil’d, Leander neither dreamed. No trick, except my heart against myself. Yet I would woo thee, if I could, with all the wit I can devise. But if I can bring nothing else to bear, we’ll be friends.’

‘We were friends first; we’ll be friends again,’ Beatrice finds it already true as it is spoken.

‘I would not have you think the fault is thine. The list of virtues I would have in one, was never touched by woman before thee; the labors of the mighty Hercules, would from Diana’s bosom leave me cold. Were I but Sypretes! I would be a rare cup-bearer, were I not encamped cross th’Ionian.’

‘If I were a man --’

‘Yes. A thousand yeses.’

‘Then shall I play Iphis, and lie with you as maids do?’ Beatrice draws back to give him space to protest, but he grips her hand as if a man drowning, mouth slackening and gaze distant. ‘Do you think when I lay with my cousin we wished for a signior bedfellow? No; without a nib she wrote such stories on my skin that I do shiver to remember it.’ 

Benedick stirs from this sudden dream, long-murdered longing turned to fragile hope. ‘That...that I would have you do.’

‘Shiver? Never, for my blood runs hot at the thought —’ Beatrice stops herself; she knows she can be more schoolboy wit than wise. 

But Benedick picks up their old thread, preparing to volley. ‘O Aphrodite,’ he says, eyes gleaming once more, ‘teach me to weave anew. By this hand I will love thee, and I will not swear by it, but make you swear by it who has taken it.’

Aphrodite invoked, Beatrice is sore tested. Not three weeks since, Benedick would have sworn it louder than herself that she is more maenad than grace, yet she will not repay devotion with madness; such gentleness has her undone. She will not throw this off today, though all other days she be a mule.

‘We will with softer touches make a bed,’ she promises, a flame of fierceness growing in her, ‘though out of bed we fight like cat and dog. Your heavy soldier’s sword let me gird on, and add Athena to your pantheon. So I, still seamed, may seeming master be — or move from war, to woo more peaceably.’

Benedick’s eyes flutter closed. Her hand still in his, he falls to his knees, kissing her belly through her thin shift, inhaling open-mouthed as he nuzzles into her hips. She grasps the downy hairs at his neck and pulls his gaze up to see a Benedick newly met: mouth swollen and moon-eyed, limbs loose and oh, so open. With none of the soldier’s bearing of the last days he begs her to command him, and though she knows him now one of few men she could follow without irk, she wonders what she could make of them both, seeing him so willingly give her the reins.

‘I have eyes, and hands, and mouth,’ he says, ‘therefore bid me stay, to make such soft touches as thou wilt have of me.’ The words are thick in his mouth, spoken as from a great distance, before he returns muffled to the crease of her thigh. ‘I will build altars, and write such worships, and hail the Bacchae, though they rend me for’t.’

‘Not rent, but rendered,’ says Beatrice, feeling his words reverberate into her. ‘I will requite thee, and as he earns from off’ring this delight, so gift I treasures to my acolyte — but come, let us inside, lest your pagan worship shock the good Christians in the square below us.’

‘I hear, O fiery muse, and will come,’ Benedick replies, his tone more impish than reverent, and Beatrice starts to think their coupling wiser than they had known it.


	3. Chapter 3

Benedick’s quiet calm is almost frightening, so forcible is the change in him. He clings to drape and bedpost like a drunkard, goes easily to the wall, to the bed. A gentle touch or look and he scrambles to obey; Beatrice murmurs and he’s on the bed, shirt over his head before the order is done.

Their hurried consummation aborted, she’d had little opportunity before, so she takes time to admire. The lines of his soldier’s tan are dark on a faintly freckled chest, a faded scar over his left ribs. She’d wondered, never asked. Long eyelashes, and a few days’ beard. He looks down, squirming under the attention, but does not ask for reprieve, and secret parts of her heart sing notes newly written.

She steps between his knees, already fallen apart to give her room. She turns his cheek, better to see his eyes; her next words could bruise or bless - or both. ‘Shall I unsex you, then?’ she gambles, and sees him melt further as he leans his head to her hand. His lips part to nuzzle her wrist, whuffs of hot breath pebbling her nipples. ‘An it please you.’

‘It does,’ Beatrice hums, ‘but both must agree, or quit the game unpleased.’ She hovers her thumb over his mouth. ‘Will you?’

He cranes his neck forward in answer, capturing her fingertip and starting to suck, and Beatrice feels things she lacks begin to stir in her — but pulls back, delighted by his quiet whine as he chases her finger. ’“Please” is spoken, now find better uses for my mouth,’ he says, impatient, and laughs as Beatrice pushes him onto his back, climbing atop him and rewarding his eager tongue with her own, then two fingers. His cheeks hollow, and he laves with the same worshipful relish he had done on that first night.

Where before she had felt open and vulnerable, Beatrice wants now to breach, to possess, to dismantle. She can feel Benedick hard against her, and distantly realises she is wet — but that can wait; she’ll tell him to match her later, she thinks, with only faint surprise at her new certainty he will obey. For now she wants not to chase her own pleasure, but to be the source and master of his. She rests a knee between his legs and he starts to rut against her, reaching to swallow her fingers down, needy and animal. He lifts his own thigh towards her, and a few long strokes leave her trembling and aching. Benedick reaches under her skirt, but she shakes her head. ‘Hands down, and breeches off; I would have all of you.’

He unlaces, and the undignified wriggle required to disrobe with an insistent body on top of one’s own ensues, and they’re both laughing as Beatrice topples to her side, fondly enjoying both beautiful cock and carefree lack of dignity. ‘Done,’ he triumphs, and she pins him to the bed for it, glee turning to blissful serenity as she fills his mouth again. She reaches between his legs, runs a finger down past his prick and sees his mouth tighten, feels a hint of teeth. He whimpers and squirms, and she pulls her hand away to rest on his shoulder, leaves him free to speak. She has heard soldiers’ tales, via Margaret, and doubts her intent can be unknown to him, but she cannot be sure it would be welcome.

He turns his cheek to kiss her hand, then looks up. ‘Gently,’ he says, ‘and something to wet the entry’. She hesitates, but he guides her to her own wetness and leans back on his elbows, watching, daring. She reaches, runs a slick fingertip over his hole, watches the long line of his throat stretch as his head falls back. Slips through resistance to a narrow ring of muscle and beyond, sliding into smooth velvet warmth. Tighter than Beatrice’s ever been, it seems impossible he could permit the intrusion, but he hisses and clenches on her as she attempts to withdraw, hips canting. Hands reach for her, scrabble on the bedsheets. She leans down to dart her tongue against his open mouth, and at the sound he makes, she knows one finger will not be enough for either of them. She wants him like this, fucked and pliant and laid out beneath her like a feast, wants him beyond argument and wit, wants him to honour and obey. No witnesses would swear this is the man she married; this is a new secret husband, boneless and wordless, smiling dreamily as he rubs his face against hers like a lazy cat. She crooks her finger. He jolts, prick twitching up, and fair howls as she stills.

“Did I —?”

His smile turns wry. ‘It’s…good. A surprise.’ She’d touched something strawberry-shaped, smooth and firm. ‘Find the gland again? Long strokes, firm pressure.’ She presses up and in, questing slower. Benedick ripples around her and his prick jerks to kiss his belly, starting to run.

Beatrice tugs at his tightness again while she rubs over the nut of tissue, feeling him start to open as he mewls and pants. He grimaces and grabs her wrist when she starts to slip a second finger in, breath hissing through his teeth. ‘Too much?’

‘Too much becomes enough, becomes too little. Hold fast a moment.’ He relaxes in increments, a wave from eyes to mouth to neck and down, until with a long-held breath she feels his arse sink back onto the bed. He opens his eyes to hers, rocks his hips. Mouths ‘Diana,’ and bares his neck.

Beatrice bites. Harder than she’d intended, but impossible to miss the straining of his prick in reply, and how every other part of him loosens further, welcoming her; she slides in until her knuckles brush his taint. Feels the thrum of blood under her teeth and around her hand, and sucks his shoulder a second ring for him to wear. There’s a pool of arousal on his belly now, a rivulet running to his navel, another running down into the soft hair of his prick. She dips her free hand into it to present to him and he swallows her down, purring and licking between her fingers. She has not the organ to make sense of this, but she feels it in her anyway, suction and eager tongue flickering with single focus. Finds his gland again, and is rewarded by the buzz of a hungry groan into her palm. Rocks her hand in earnest, now, delighted by the play of muscle in his shoulders, his heels scrabbling for purchase on the bed as he seeks to fuck himself on her insistent fingers. She’s finding the spot easily now, curving her fingers on the downstroke to watch him whimper, delighting in the strain of his neck to take her fingers deeper, the tightness of his throat when she lets him. She kisses his forehead, as tender as she fucks him rough below, and feels his throat begin to shudder.

She pulls back and sits on her heels, denying him all sensation but a lazy stroke inside. Admires him dazed and wet with sweat, trails spit-slick fingers down his chest, and waits. Waits until his focus narrows to that one point inside him, enjoying the sympathetic tension coiling in her own cunt. ‘What’s needed to end this?’

‘This, exactly this, a little more —’

She slows her hand and lightens the touch to a tickle, laughs as he pouts, and laughs more when he wails as the laughter jolts him against her hand. ‘I asked for information, not instruction,’ she says, and oh, the face he makes is promising.

‘I will take such lovely vengeance,’ he threatens, hair plastered to his brow and mussed by the sheets, pink-cheeked and prick near purple with effort, and Beatrice laughs again, splaying her palm over taut left nipple and holding him down, her hand curved protectively over the pale scar, his heart leaping under her fingertips. His hands, kept obediently away for so long, ghost gently around her forearm, permitting the confinement. ‘As you will,’ he sighs, impish hope turning to earnest submission, and Beatrice forgets any aim but the desire to overwhelm him. She shoves deep, twists, fucks generously into gland and taint and mattress, steals the air from his mouth as he keens dry-breathed on every stroke, until his hands tighten on her arm and breath breaks and he shudders and cries out, jets of arousal arcing to his chest as he curls up to meet her mouth, gasping as he tightens around her, as the root of his cock pulses in time with his heart under her hand.

The moon has risen unnoticed during their coupling, spilling bright into the room. Beatrice's breath is still ragged, though Benedick stills.

His hole is tight again and she slips out of him, marvelling at how open the rest remains - how clear and unlined his face, how soft his hands, younger than she’d seen him for many years. How young they both had been, and how proud, at their first disastrous meetings. How easily shamed. She could still feel that shame, now, but dried and dusty like a salamander’s skin, too-small on her back, falling off in long curls. A little of the like is gone from Benedick now, and she sees the tender newness beneath.

His eyes sharpen as his fade fades, and she leans a little more heavily onto him, not willing to quit playing the master yet. He does not struggle, but pulls his shirt between them, beckons her hand to clean her, wipes himself, flings the shirt across the room, then slumps back into softness, smile floating at the corners of his eyes. ‘Come, fall over me,’ he says, and she does, legs bracketing and arms bracketed. The ache between her legs is quietly insistent, but there is time enough for this pause, this stillness at the spring.

‘How go you?’ Benedick breaks the silence, fingercombing her hair. ‘I believe I am in your debt - loan me a moment’s rest more, and I will pay you such interest as you cannot help but appreciate.’ He attempts to rise but falls back, hissing, looking wounded at his shoulder. Stippling purple is spreading between teethmarks. ‘By Our Lady, Beatrice!’

‘By your lady, yes,’ says Beatrice, not repentant even to the length of a gnat’s wing. ‘Your lady mule, as I did warn you.’

‘A mule?! This is no mule’s bite. I thank God there is no true venom in you. A she-wolf would not have bit me so, had I strayed into the Lupercal!’

‘You would not have such kisses, then?’

Benedick screws his eyes shut and his hand into his bruise, throwing off dignity. ‘Oh, to deny it pains me more than the taking of it — aye, I’d have this again. It is a pale thing, to live unbruised.’ He tilts her chin and leans in, his mouth a finger from her own. ‘I will take it, and let her soothe it who has given it, and revel in her kisses, though they be fanged —’

Beatrice shoves him in his good shoulder, laughing. ‘Live and die unsoothed! _Your_ mouth rattles like the ill-axled carriage, which shakes until we are all overthrown.’

‘My mouth rattles, and you would be overthrown? In such a coach you would hope to ride.’

‘Ride, no. I’ll prove a horseman, if you give me rein.’

Benedick starts to trace circles on her thigh with his thumb. ‘Drive me - to distraction, to the devil…to wherever thou goest,’ he finishes, his voice thickening.

‘_From_ distraction,’ Beatrice replies firmly. ‘You were to be revenged, if that was not more rattling of your tongue.’

Benedick opens his mouth, closes it again. ‘You’ll praise my rattling tongue,’ he starts, ‘and think on it forever changed hereafter. Mock me not; I will for you work now such services to make you blush when publicly I speak.’

Beatrice raises her eyebrows. ‘Get to it, then,’ she says, and pushes his head southwards.


End file.
